Original art by Sandrine Curtiss

Another Colored Pencils Magazine challenge, another opportunity to try something new. This is my second attempt at using sanded paper, this time it's the Uart 600 grade, and I didn't use the Powder Blender. I did my first layer with the Supracolor pencils. I've been wanting to try using water soluble pencils as a base for my colored pencil drawings for a long time, so that's what I did. The Supracolor II pencils are very buttery and diluting them with water was a dream. No pencil marks left. Also, using the sanded paper allowed me to only use a few layers and still have a lot of pigments on the paper. Once my base layer was dry, I started using the Prismacolor pencils, but I found them too soft for the sanded paper ( I probably need to give them another good try to get a definite opinion, as wells as use different grade sanded papers) and had a hard time with details. So I quickly switched to my Pablo pencils which worked like a charm. I'd seen someone use a bristle paint bursh over their pencil layers on sanded paper to blend them, so I tried, but I didn't get the result I expected so I didn't do it much.
What I liked about the sanded paper: No need to add many layers. Colors blend fairly well. You can add lighter colors on top of darker ones. No need to use a white gel pen for your highlights!
What I didn't like: Some colors are harder than others so it's harder to get a soft result, I occasionally had to use mineral spirit to soften the look. Using colored pencils on sanded paper creates a LOT of dust which gets the paper (and everything else around you) dirty, even when covering the part you're not working on. I had a lot of cleaning up to do.
In conclusion, it's not the end of my relationship with sanded paper yet, and I will use water soluble colored pencils again, it's soooo much fun!

A big thank you to photographer Sally Robertson for the reference photo.

I'm happy to report that this piece won the December 2016 1st place in the advanced category. Such an honor!
It's currently in a show until the end of February, and will be for sale as soon as I get it back, so stay on the look out if you're interested.